Protesters urge Wayne State to stop research on dogs (with video)

The Oakland Press/DUSTIN BLITCHOK
Toni Grinnan of Beverly Hills protested Wayne State University research that uses dogs on the university’s campus on Thursday with her terrier mix, Velcro. “These experiments have been shown to be not very useful,” said Grinnan, who graduated from the university’s law school.

DETROIT — An 11-month-old hound named Rogue was purchased from Covance, a Virginia company, and trucked to Wayne State University in May 2012.

A little more than four months later — after research that involved heart surgeries, aortal clamps, tubes, probes and the dog being observed walking on a treadmill after the blood flow to her kidneys was reduced — Rogue was euthanized.

The dog is one of 21 that Wayne State University purchased and brought across state lines for research without certificates and veterinary inspections required by state law, a group opposed to animal research said in a complaint sent Thursday to the Michigan Department of Agriculture & Rural Development.

“They did not file the appropriate documents required when a dog is brought across state lines for experimentation purposes,” said Kenneth Litwak, a veterinarian who works as associate director of laboratory medicine at the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine.

The Washington, D.C.,-based group contends that the use of dogs in cardiovascular research at Wayne State is painful, unnecessary and inhumane. The experiments, which use treadmill training to study the relationship between exercise and heart failure, receive public funding from the National Institutes of Health and have been ongoing since 1991.

The group obtained the information about the dogs at Wayne State using the Freedom of Information Act and then requested the interstate veterinary records and certificates for the dogs from the Michigan Department of Agriculture. The state agency found no such records, according to the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine.

Wayne State University spokesman Matt Lockwood said no violations were found in the university’s labs this week after an unannounced inspection by the United States Department of Agriculture.
“I would say that every major medical advance in the last century for both humans and animals came about through animal research,” Lockwood said. “We’re committed to ensuring that all of our research that’s done and all of our teaching protocols using animals are carried out in a humane manner.”
The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine “is taking information out of context and misleading the public about how animals are treated at Wayne State. Animals are treated very humanely here,” he said.

The records that the animal rights group obtained for Betty, another hound used in Wayne State experiments, showed that the dog received food and water once during the trip from Virginia to Michigan.

Surgeries on Betty placed probes around her aorta, as well as on coronary and renal arteries, and the carotid artery. A hole was made in her heart with a scalpel so a sensor could be inserted, according to the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine.

A total of nine wires and tubes emerged from Betty’s skin, the group said. The dog was euthanized after about four months at Wayne State.

A petition was delivered to Wayne State University President M. Roy Wilson asking him to pull the plug on the experiments.

Dr. Jennifer Giordano, a psychiatrist who lives in Oakland Township, was among those at the protest.
“Over the past 20 years these experiments have been going on, they’ve yielded no information that has been beneficial to human health,” she said.

Wayne State’s Lockwood disputes this: “Progress is being made in the research being done here at Wayne State. The (National Institutes of Health) just recently re-upped the funding. They don’t just give this funding out for nothing. You’ve got to be showing progress,” he said.

“They don’t want us to use animals in research, so of course they’re going to disagree. But, you’ve got the entire scientific community and the federal government on the other side.”
Beverly Hills resident Toni Grinnan is a graduate of the Wayne State University Law School. She brought her terrier mix, Velcro, to Thursday’s protest.

“I suspect it’s (about) chasing grant money,” Grinnan said of the research. “There’s no excuse for hurting dogs when they’re not getting any more out of this work.”

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About the Author

I cover the City of Pontiac, as well as the northern Oakland County communities of Brandon Township, the Village of Ortonville, Springfield Township and Groveland Township. Reach the author at dustin.blitchok@oakpress.com
or follow Dustin on Twitter: @SincerelyDustin.